How do virtual waiting rooms work?
A deep dive into how virtual waiting rooms and queue management systems work to prevent system overloads and crashes; Know from Queue Fair Experts.
Manage traffic peaks. Avoid website crashes from high demand.
Treat your visitors with unrivalled fairness.
Queue-Fair is the original virtual waiting room for busy websites, invented by us and originally patented in 2004. When your site has more visitors than it can handle gracefully, the excess visitors are automatically sent away from your webservers to a branded online queue - it then sends visitors back to your site in first-come, first-served order at the rate that you desire.
We handle the world's largest queues. We queue hundreds of thousands of people every day.
By using the world's most accurate, highest quality, most powerful and best value Virtual Waiting Room platform, you ensure that your site can keep selling at its optimum transaction rate. Your site visitors, shoppers, ticket buyers, and app users always get the responsive experience they require, even when you are really busy. They won't see a crashed site.
‘Great platform! Queue-Fair is really easy to use, with great customer support - always respond quickly and clearly. The great live reporting helped us monitor traffic during event launches accurately, and was easy to integrate and brand too. Queue-Fair ensures everyone gets a fair chance at attending our events, which we really value.’
‘Our website and services could not satisfy the peak demand of our offers. Queue-Fair saved our bacon! Straightforward to understand and easy to implement, with great support throughout the process. We can now run our campaigns reliably, confident that our website will cope.’
‘An Excellent Solution for High Traffic Management! The team is highly professional and attentive to customer needs. The platform is easy to integrate. Queue-Fair helps us manage unexpected spikes, ensuring our website stays functional during peak demand.’
‘Superb! User friendly, easy to set up and get going - and superb business communication! Queue-Fair works great when things heat up, and helps reduce the load of the ticketing website. By building Queue-Fair with ease of use in mind, it enabled the support team to use it - no devs required!’
‘We are very glad to have Queue-Fair as our Waiting Room partner for the three big iPhone launch events. Our website did not crash! We even went beyond our Sales Target, thanks to Queue-Fair! The Queue-Fair platform is user-friendly - very easy to use - and the data reports gave us meaningful insights for our future projects. We are very happy to have them as our partner :) Queue-Fair will surely be our only Waiting Room recommendation to our dear friends. More power Queue-Fair! Good job!’
‘Just what we needed! Feedback was really good and Queue-Fair worked how we needed it to. If you've got thousands of people hitting refresh on a large ticket onsale you need a safety net! The costs of having Queue-Fair compared with the costs of database issues or dealing with angry customers means it is a no brainer. We're really happy with it!’
‘Robust, lifesaver and easy to implement! We love how fast you can start using it and with a very user-friendly interface. There are no downsides of using Queue-Fair, which solved our problem of high traffic management in certains moments so we don't miss any sales and keep customer experience good as possible! Everything that I was expecting to resolve my problems with high traffic was resolved as soon as I implemented Queue-Fair.’
‘Demand for our Totally Roarsome event was off the charts! I'm really pleased I reached out to Queue-Fair. You've been incredibly helpful. Above and beyond the call of duty. They got it all set up so quickly - a fully branded virtual waiting room in just a day, and the queue worked perfectly. Our booking system would have been completely overwhelmed without Queue-Fair. We had over 16,000 people in the queue. Can't believe the queue cost us less than £150! Thanks so much!’
‘We have events which are extremely popular resulting in large numbers of people hitting our website at one time. Queue-Fair helps manage that, solving the problem. We best liked the support during set up and the ease of use. We recommend Queue-Fair because it is an excellent alternative to other queue providers, offering excellent support.’
‘Reduced the stress of our online store launch day! We launched a brand new website on the same day that we opened for orders this year. Launch day provides a huge rush of customers to our website and having Queue-Fair in place helped us to feel at ease throughout this experience. We received zero emails from customers about the queue (which we attribute as a sign that it was all working well). The queue was easy to integrate into our website. Our experience with the Queue-Fair team was smooth and professional, and best of all our customers had a great experience! We appreciated the peace of mind that having Queue-Fair provided.’
‘Great service with great team! Easy boarding, efficient to cope with peak loads! High availability of the service!’
‘So reactive and easy to integrate! Their team is very reactive: from setup to test and deployment in production, they were able to help us deploy their solution in less than 1 hour. Only few lines of code are required. Website rescuers! Queue-Fair simple to use, quick to integrate and does the job. Avoid website crash!’
Even the world's biggest companies get overwhelmed by peaks in demand, particularly sudden peaks. Systems architects make decisions based on expected demand and usual traffic rates. It is usually not possible to scale the tech serving your site on demand to prevent a website crash. All webservers have limits, and when they are exceeded, your visitors experience a crashed site.
More Orders
People who have been queued are keener to purchase and buy more - as much as 20% more in each shopping cart, according to our customers.
More Customers
Queue-Fair means you can serve new customers even when your servers are too busy to handle them. People who see an error page or no response at all from your site are unlikely to return - but you can reach all these people with Queue-Fair.
More Fair
Our unique synchronized people ahead counter means that people in the queue can always see that it is moving fairly.
More Ethical
Fairness matters to your visitors, and of course to us! We ensure no-one loses their place in our original first-come, first-served queues, and that visitors arrive at your site in the same order that they joined the queue. That's why we invented it in the first place.
More Fun
Animated progress bars in a range of brand-matching styles. Our unique synchronized ticking People Ahead Counter shows visitors that the queue is always moving forward, and always moving fairly.
Safeguard your website from crashes, peaks, bots and also your company's ethical reputation
More Safe
Discover the wealth of security features available with Queue-Fair to protect your site, app or NFT drop from malicious use.
More Responsible
Our wonderful customers tell us we're lovely people and a pleasure to deal with - and that's what really matters to us. We created the Virutal Waiting Room to make the world a fairer place, so you can be sure of our core values. We always put our customers first. Always.
More Value
Our proprietary process is cheaper to run than any other method. We pass on the cost savings to you. This also allows us to give you more on our Free Tier service than any other provider.
More Speed
Our process means we run the fastest queue servers in the world, and offer unlimited queue capacity on all our service plans.
More Opportunity
Keep the customers that you would lose to your competitors during costly down time. Use your queues to show product slideshows, videos or personalised marketing content to your visitors while they wait.
More Equitable
Our PreSale randomiser prevents touts & scalpers from snapping up all your tickets or stock, and we can use the queue to enforce one-order-per-customer for you too.
More Reliable
We run the most accurate Virtual Waiting Room service and will send you the exact right number of people each and every minute - the key to stable load on your servers. Unlike other providers our queues turn on the very instant that you need them too.
Adapters in every major web server language. Secure Plugins for every major ecommerce platform. Or, add Queue-Fair to your site with JavaScript with one line of code on your page - or no lines at all with Google Tag Manager.
You can also run Queue-Fair at the Network-edge, running on your CDN or Cloud Services provider before requests reach your origin server.
Adapters available for your busy iOS, Android and React Native apps too.
Find out why Queue-Fair is the most widely-integrated queue platform on earth.
Protect your e-commerce site from costly down time
Queue-Fair helps you reach the customers that would be lost when your systems are overloaded, so your site or app can keep selling at its optimum transaction rate.
Sell all your tickets in one day safely and securely
Prevent the dreaded Refresh Refresh Refresh that kills your servers and damages fan loyalty. Show them that you care about their experience with our fair queue.
Cope gracefully with events, registrations and enrolments
You needn't scale your systems just for one busy day a year. Queue-Fair is fair and transparent for your students - who can go away and come back later without losing their place.
Handle massive public demand effortlessly and safely
Why stress out your IT department or your stakeholders? Conserve your resources and cope with any level of demand gracefully with Queue-Fair.
Invented and originally patented in 2004, Queue-Fair is the original Virtual Waiting Room, providing online queue management for busy websites and apps.
2026 The Fair Queue People Ltd. - All Rights Reserved.
Part of the Orderly family of queue solutions - OrderlyQ - OrderlyStats - WeQ4U